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The Waymo effect: how AI is quietly making research less collaborative

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Re: The Waymo effect: how AI is quietly making research less collaborative

#51
post #32

I work at an intersection of tech, applied research, and science. Something I’ve noticed in collaboration that does occur is an increased confidence in people outside their domains to say things with conviction. I have people who have limited experience with software pushing out layers and layers of abstracted code that’s fairly sophisticated but often misguided in intent who will say what they’re doing is correct, w…

Instant armchair pundit: just add tokens!

Re: The Waymo effect: how AI is quietly making research less collaborative

#52
post #31

Earlier quoted context omitted.

People aren't treating it as a thoughtful contribution. It is more of a flag, like "spam".

HN already has a feature for that. Just flag the article!

I appreciate when people write things like, "this is an advertisement for the author's product, X." Why stay silent? If the commenter's accusation smells fishy, I'll read the article myself. Otherwise, they helped me.

Re: The Waymo effect: how AI is quietly making research less collaborative

#53
post #4

This article is written by an LLM, by the way. ("Quietly" is... as Claude might put it... "often the quiet tell".)

I wanted you to be wrong, and to be able to make this an example of us over-reacting to certain trigger words created by AI, but unfortunately I just scanned the first couple paragraphs with pangram and it reported 100% AI, so you're probably correct. I get a funny feeling in my stomach over the idea that common and effective means of communication (i.e. it's not X it's Y) have become faux pas to use because of AI. I…

Pangram should be paying HNers for how often we pitch needing to use their product by name to believe things as obvious as "a long form news article cramming every AI trope it can fit from start to finish" being AI written.

At this point I'm surprised when a news article isn't largely AI written, let alone one using the default tone! I don't even mind it as much as others seem to, it's just turning into more and more of a rarity for a news article to not be these last few years and so is now what sticks out.

Re: The Waymo effect: how AI is quietly making research less collaborative

#54

How come self-driving came years before LLMs which seems to me an easier problem? Self-driving seems insanely hard compared to text generation.

a) Self driving was far from completely solved before LLMs.

b) Text generation essentially means passing the Turing test, which for a long time was the bar for general intelligence. Locomotion does not necessarily require general intelligence.

Re: The Waymo effect: how AI is quietly making research less collaborative

#55
AI is extremely useful, but it’s also extremely easy to fool yourself into thinking you understand what is going on without really understanding. This is often true with the code, but also for math and science concepts, etc.

Not many professions are formally trained to be cognizant of this lack of understanding, and how to confront it.

Usage of AI in collaborative settings is an amplifier of these issues, especially if someone doesn’t realize they don’t understand: they couldn’t teach or explain the concepts they use, or be forced to work with them malleably in a way that an expert or researcher would.

If you are cognizant of your lack of understanding, you can remedy it by slowing down and teaching yourself. This is required to make better use of AI in the domain of interest!

But you can’t have all things at once: you can’t move at speed with AI, collaborate effectively, and understand what is going on as an expert would. It is not physically possible for a human brain.

Re: The Waymo effect: how AI is quietly making research less collaborative

#56
post #50
post #4

This article is written by an LLM, by the way. ("Quietly" is... as Claude might put it... "often the quiet tell".)

Is it OK to flag articles for being AI-written? I really want to.

No, it is not.

Re: The Waymo effect: how AI is quietly making research less collaborative

#57

How come self-driving came years before LLMs which seems to me an easier problem? Self-driving seems insanely hard compared to text generation.

llms right now work like pre cnn computer vision based on MLP's. By this i mean brute force of a model not really built for the task, and lacking a task specific inductive bias, being made work with unfathomable volumes of data and sheer brute scale.

if you look at the damage being done in the name of making this work for nlp, a forseeable situation, then you might also understand why most who could have done this sooner, never did so for fear of repeating mistakes we should be learning from, which we get for free if we just heed history.

Re: The Waymo effect: how AI is quietly making research less collaborative

#58
post #31

Earlier quoted context omitted.

HN already has a feature for that. Just flag the article!

I appreciate when people write things like, "this is an advertisement for the author's product, X." Why stay silent? If the commenter's accusation smells fishy, I'll read the article myself. Otherwise, they helped me.

To me, it’s the equivalent of “HN is turning into Reddit” - it’s just a complaint without adding to the discussion.

Re: The Waymo effect: how AI is quietly making research less collaborative

#59
post #32

I work at an intersection of tech, applied research, and science. Something I’ve noticed in collaboration that does occur is an increased confidence in people outside their domains to say things with conviction. I have people who have limited experience with software pushing out layers and layers of abstracted code that’s fairly sophisticated but often misguided in intent who will say what they’re doing is correct, w…

We are going back to philosopher conversations. Just a few guys sitting on the stairs, with chalk, the street as their whiteboard, the jammer keeping the LLM-zombies away. After 2000 years, after the loudness makes right post-modern-pre-llm drivel of the frankfurter school- its a philosopher renaissance as resistance.

[dead]

Re: The Waymo effect: how AI is quietly making research less collaborative

#60
post #32

I work at an intersection of tech, applied research, and science. Something I’ve noticed in collaboration that does occur is an increased confidence in people outside their domains to say things with conviction. I have people who have limited experience with software pushing out layers and layers of abstracted code that’s fairly sophisticated but often misguided in intent who will say what they’re doing is correct, w…

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